Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/13

Rh succeeded in landing you into a new Hell. … There has been no progress, least of all moral progress. … And it is just our Morality, which has prohibited all real progress, and—what is worse—which even stands in the way of every future and natural reconstruction in this ruined world of ours. … I look at this world, and I shudder at its ghastliness: I shudder all the more, as I know the spiritual authors of all this ghastliness. …

But its authors themselves, unconscious in this as in all they are a know nothing yet of this startling revelation. While Europe is aflame, while its victims scream, while its dogs howl in the conflagration, and while its very smoke descends in darker and even darker shades upon our Continent, the Jews, or at least a part of them, and by no means the most unworthy one, endeavour to escape from the burning building, and wish to retire from Europe into Asia, from the sombre scene of our disaster into the sunny corner of their Palestine. Their eyes are closed to the miseries, their ears are deaf to the moanings, their heart is hardened to the anarchy of Europe: they only feel their own sorrows, they only bewail their own fate, they only sigh under their own burdens. … They know nothing of their duty to Europe, which looks around in vain for help and guidance, they know nothing even of their own great ancestors, to whose heart the appeal of pity was never made in vain: they have me too poor in love, too sick at heart, too tired of battle, and lo! these sons of those who were once the bravest of soldiers are now trying to retire from the trenches to the rear, are now eager to exchange the grim music of the whistling shells with that of the cow-bells and vintage songs in the happy plain of Saron. …

And yet we are not all Financiers, we are not all Bolshevists, we have not all become Zionists. … And yet there is hope, great hope, that this same Race which has provided the Evil will likewise succeed in supplying its antidote, its remedy—the Good. It has always been so in the past—was not that fatal Liberalism, which has